Doctor Who And The Catswept Moon Of Herb-Bright Ness Settle Pont
by Erbanana
Summary: Doctor Who shows up in time to save the town from a grotty princess and helps the homosexual Char-lie to overcome prejudice in an emergency before the world erupts into lava. [revised]
1. Chapter 1

Chapter One – The Doctor Saves The Town.

;

"This is how I write stories," says Princess Moon, "in present tense and without author's notes." There is a roud of applause.

"And this is how..! Why hello there, man in a blue box! When did you arrive Mr President of Authors' –"

"No time!" cries the man.

"The town is on fire!" cries the next contestant. Waving from beside the stage, he jumps off and grabs the blue box man's sleeve. "This way, Mr President! I will guide you to safety!"

"Thank you," says the blue box man. "This way! We may end up together tied up in a worble trix of time continuum energy, but I think I can fix it! Here, hold this screwdriver, while we –"

Then they left the hall, followed by several thousand from the audience.

The Princess sat on the stage all by herself. "What a dumb day," she cries. "No one even noticed me and my flowing poetry." Here, she turns to the wall and blew her little white nose on the flowing, hanging scroll. Here, she cries again, dumbly and mutely. "Because I'm not ableist. I'm just quiet dumb not stupid dumb.

"Nor am I deaf!" she cries, aiming her little pink face towards the ceiling, towards the gods of Catswept Moon.

"Hear me, Gods of Cats-Wept Moon, hear me Goddesses of Encyclopedia, and Relatives of those considered Godworthy! My town is on fire! Weep, damn you my gods, Weep your tears from your sprinkler systems and save My Town!" She waits, for a reply.

"Yes, my Princess Moon?"

The God swings down from the sky, the domed head of Cats-Wept, and

the god swings her arm down low, low enough to crook her hand into an encyclopedian shape, worthy enough for a princess to encroach.

;

The Doctor fiddles with his tie.

The next contestant called Char-lie grabs the pipes and turns the valve clockwise while several hundred people copied him likewise all lined along the corridor. They then all grabbed the flowing water in their cup-like palms and hurried towards the fire.

Several palmfuls later, and the town is still on fire.

"This won't do!" cried the Doctor. He grabs the valve and twists and turns it until it breaks. Water gushes out vertically and horizontally blows out of the joints, blowing out the nuts and bolts until water starts spraying over the people. Several men turn up their collars against the blast.

"This will do!" cries the Doctor, holding up a screwdriver; it glows green and silver. He fiddles with the thermostat – and the water starts to boil in the lower pipes.

It doesn't take long. Several woman run forward wearing hats and start fishing deep down in the pipework. One suchlike woman produces a key from her knickerleg.

"Here –" she cries. She chucks the key over her shoulder, aiming at Charlie.

He raises up from a crouch to catch it, spilling sweet water from his palms to do so.

He spills water over the Doctor in his haste to open a nearby door. It opens into a closet.

Char-lie runs in and grabs a mop-broom-bucket ensemble and assembles it as he staggers out, bent double under the weight.

The Doctor grabs it before it tips over. "How do you work this then, Charley?" He stops fiddling with his telescope, rams it into his pocket, and turns around, coat-tails a-flying.

"The Catswept Gods were last contacted, oh, about two seconds ago," cries the Doctor. "If I'm right, and I'm usually very very right about these matters, the domed sky will part, and there's a forcefield to stop us all wibbling wobbling into space, very weak gravity this planet, you know, if it wasn't for trade with the humans you lot would all still be instinctively sucked back into your shells, that's how you lot survived the last comet trail to connect with your moons, sorry, Satellites of Worship."

;

Meanwhile, the Princess Moon is crying, "Please-please help me, Gods of Cats-Wept, the town cries in pain for your generosity. Please-please weep upon them."

"We don't Cry, you know," says the God. "It's Humans that have the Tear Ducts of Metaphor."

"But-but we Weep," she cries. "We weep from our little white noses."

"I'm pretty sure that's just phy-lie-va. Only the Humans were most interested in it for their Collection of Alien Biology. Everyone else is very most "Eurrggh"."

;

The Doctor stares heavenwards.

"Should have been, oh, about two seconds ago!"

Nothing happens apart from the pipework metaphorically intent on soaking the townsfolk not the town. Several woman still fish down in the depth-works, sorting out the evacuees from their shrill children.

phy-lie-va runs down Char-lie's frontal lobes. "Oh no!" he sobs. "The clock! The clock!"

Fire consumes the church and its clock-rocks.

Lava burns over the town and the people still trapped in their underground homes start audibly coughing from the ash-drawn air. Every breath fills the sudden silence as several hundred fire-hunters stop fishing and run towards the lava, instinctively stopping to tuck up into their shells and hover over the slurping lava. Some get lost in the ash, churned up into the landscape like grey, soupy fog.

"No!" cries Charlie, reaching out. "My husband!"

The small crowd around the Doctor turn round. "Husband? Surely you jest, Char-lie?"

Charlie opens all palms to his throat. "My wife," he coughs, "my wife."

"Better," says the next person to the Doctor. "We won't tell."

"I would," says the furthest person to the Doctor. "We may not have a town, nor a church, but we still have our magistrate down in the pipework, and we are a town without disasters!"

"Disasters?" queries the Doctor. "This town is a disaster! No proper fire-fighters until four hundred years from now! It takes seven more earthquakes and one more towering volcano before you lot even consider moving! There's an underground burrow, about, oh you lot find it after trading with the Vorax and maybe after a Dalek or two invasions, you hibernate with cryogenics and survive the next era alongside the Humans and the Alliance, etcetera, etcetera, and –"

A crash from the pipework signals that it's about to fall over, over several hundred trying fire-fighters and evacuee-haulers.

The furthest person from the Doctor grabs the sobbing Charlie, and shoves him and his wavering cry-pulse complete with phy-lie-va into the fleeing rescuers.

"Take that, Char-lie-with-husband-and-against-our-moon-church. Die in the pipework water-battle for we want no one like you."

"Hear we," cries another also offended. "Our town may burn but we are still vigilant against the disasters of mutated nature, when like nurtures like, instead of –"

;

Princess Moon was deep in offensive battle with her Gods.

More had joined the Woman God with the encyclopedian crook and were fiercely heating the domed sky, forcing the heat from the lava into every nook and cranny to displace it.

Little by little, they argued, the lava would die itself out, and go back to ravaging the torn surface of their vortex planet.

Meanwhile it would take several generations to rebuild the town, contact the Humans and diminish their stock of plutonium again to buy a better construction out of their Alien Eco Flat-pack Villages.

Already, the Gods had contacted the ageing NASA on Jupiter and were asking for advice on waking up the A.I. Helper App that was modelled on their first survivor, in shell, found stuck to a human generation spaceship, like one of their pond-snails.

Unfortunately, she-it had not survived the volcano, nor the vortex, that had transported her that far out in space, but how she had survived stuck to a human space vessel for nine weeks without them noticing her, no one on Catswept World had known. Luckily, the human scientists had reconstructed her in A.I. land, and even had knew what her last meal had been, how she preferred to swing her phy-lie-va over her shoulder when she was happy yet terrified to leave her building when asked to leave by the magistrates, because the human scientists had vocalised her brainwaves. They had reconstructed her walking or slimeing forwards, and planted her on their town when the humans discovered them via space satellites, space telescopes, and every else that humans used to spy on aliens back in the old days.

They had even reconstructed the blue box that had frequented them so much inside their human history.

Which is why Princess Moon wasn't arguing so vehemently as she should. The thought had been nuzzling her for some time. The President of Authors' Notes didn't quite exist, she thinks. It's only a meta-work concept, she remembers. But that little white business square of such important authorship had quite turned her phy-lie-va.

"I –" she began, with so much tremble that the Gods fell silent and turned as one to listen to her.

"The blue box," she musters, spitting out phy-lie-va. "It's here!" She points.

The Gods turn. "Yes," they say as one. "It's the Doctor. He's here!"

"Quick," cries one god. "Tell NASA immediately!"

"It's Torchwood, isn't it?" queries one.

"No, it's definitely NASA that lives on in old age on Jupiter. Talk to the Helper App."

"Hello!" bings the Helper App. "Please state the nature of your national emergency.

"Is it One: Volcano? Is it Two: Earthquake? Is it Three: Darleks? Is it Four: Cyberm—?"

"It's Zero: The Doctor!" cries Princess Moon of Catswept Road, Herb-Bright Ness, Settle Pont.

"Not quite," warns the Woman God removing the encyclopedian crook from her hand and instead warming up the App Receiver Radio with a plug.

Another plug in, and she talks. "Press One, Five and Nine. We've done this before, haven't we, people?"

"Yeah," cries another God. "Five for Fire and Nine for Doctor."

"Is it Eight: Vorax? Is it Nine: The Doctor and His Blue Box? Is it Ten: –"

;

The Doctor wades through the underwater stream, pushing gently aside townsfolk and children.

"This way!" he cries. "We just may have once chance to stop up the lava flow and stop the volcano from, well, doing what volcanoes are renown for doing – erupting!"

"Terrible town this," he continues. "Hardly mentioned in the history books, although I do remember a Clarence, well, similar in tones and so much. Like the wavering pulse-changes between Charlie and Char-lie. Meanwhile, it looks like this water channel is about to flow uphill, but trick of the light and all that."

The Doctor turns like he has a companion listening intense. But he encounters no one apart from the sobbing Charlie and several women, and two men with their collars turned up.

"Which way to change the heat control?" one man insists.

"Yeah? And to change the ash monitor down? I couldn't see a thing on towns level."

The closest woman to the Doctor swung her phy-lie-va over her shoulder. "I should be in the lead," she huffs.

"Yeah? Because you're descended from she-it who met-dead the first humans?"

"No," says Char-lie. "Because her love is still alive and she drums the fastest to get back to-to-to h-him." Charlie breaks down in weeping phy-lie-va.

"There, there, Char-lie." Pats a sympathetic woman. "You'll find a wife one day like everyone else, not that liver-phy-lie-vaed man you mistakened for a true love."

"Mistook," said the Doctor, absent-mindedly "You know, most humans adore homosexuality by the twenty-fifth century. It's so absurdly twenty-first century quaint! It was the last century that they had to fight for their rights. In most alien cultures for example, it takes only a few random examples for most people to ignore it. Some don't even bother to write it down. Most people don't know this, but homosexuality is a fantastic mutation that occurs in all carbon-based life! Gives a little bit of zing to bisexuality, if you know what I mean. Even asexuality, meaning plants and so on, not celibates. Earth, the human birth-world has more common sexuality arising in animals than anywhere else in the universe! Most people know that from trivia quiz-shows, but you lot haven't got round to mass telecommunications yet, let alone importing them from humans. Next time you contact them, you'd – oh, wait –"

Duely, two woman and one man waited.

"Like we wait for Gods?" one of them asked.

"What was all that about?" huffed Char-lie. "The rest of it? You're not the fabled Helper Human-Based App, are you?"

"Yeah, like what's homosexuality? You mentioned that word the most?"

The Doctor sighed. "Sometimes, I find noun-frequent languages the worst, just next to Verb Hyphen Adjective Cross-Fingers and magic-based Emotion Signals; but not as bad as phy-lie-va Hyphen Flying-Drool Finger-Cross. Homosexuality –" he turns "– is when people like Char-lie here are allowed to like people or any person who is the same gender as him! Same gender! Same sex! Or same genitals! It gets complicated when you add in gender-swapping genitals generation by generation, or alien sex drives without love."

The Doctor sniffs. "I need a companion. They're so much better at explaining this stuff to other aliens. Usually all they have to do is sweat and whiff, and the Tardis translates it automatically. And I am not –" The Doctor stops off, about to say 'the Human Helper App', but he is wise and stays mum.

"Well, I didn't understand a word of that," says one woman, turning to one man with his collar still tucked up.

"I'll reset his default settings," volunteers the man. He rolls his sleeves up, indicating that he means business. He grabs the Doctor by the throat, and rams his phy-lie-va-coated frontal lobes into his face.

He lets the Doctor go a minute later. The Doctor topples over and splashes into the water channel. A moment later, the Doctor surfaces, spluttering, for the air is becoming stale with the taste of volcanic ash.

"He-you-it breathe?" queries the technician.

"What?" cries the woman. She has turned towards the entrance, and inhales the air.

"The Helper App! It sputters and breathes!"

Meanwhile, the Doctor has high-tailed it up the water channel, purling his way through the stream. He shakes his hand.

"No!" cries Charlie. He buries his face in his palms. "I thought, it was, he – he is my salvation. I've accompanied the Human Helper App to switch off the volcano. My name will be in history, and my family will not go dishonoured due to my disaster shame. I hope, I hope that my love, he is still yet breathing above the lava and under the ash-filled air. I hope that Clarence may not notice him and me together in memory and that he is wise enough to hold a wife close from next door, so that she may not be spotted as the companion she is to all the townsmen."

"Charley!" cries the Doctor from upstream. "Follow me!"

Char-lie straightens, and after a look of horror from his townsfolk, he hurries upstream, following the Doctor, who may be his salvation, after all.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter Two – The Doctor Saves The Town With Char-lie, Not Clarence

;

The Doctor flies with haste towards Charlie. He pulls wings from behind himself and

dot dot dot

(I promised in the profile I wouldn't repeat all my younger self's dots, but the opening chapter/next chapters just called for them.)

(HAHA! I just inserted cake-face wing!fic!) As ditto.

NEW CHAPTER (Please don't delete these author's notes; it's not as though hardly anyone will read this; I would not post these if I didn't find them hilarious to read in the original.)

;

There is a little pink face flying upwards. The Princess Moon

falls upwards, hefted by her Satellite Gods of Catswept Moon

ditto ditto.

;

"Hello Clair-rens!" cries Char-lie. "I so hoped you would join us! Where's Tree-Vour, my sweet neighbour and her man?"

Clarence falls over from the weight of the mop-broom-bucket ensemble he's just carried up the stairs to the thermostat control room.

"Here," he cries, "take it – take the weight from me, you Weeping man, and set up the disc."

"Me?" cries Charlie. "I haven't played the disc since, you know, after school. It was an ashy day and I couldn't play for my sweet neighbour I hadn't met yet."

Clarence rolls all his eyes. "No one plays for their sweet school-love at school for real."

"You know," says the Doctor, detaching the meta-work wings from his back, and sliding them back into a woman's knickerleg. She turns up her collar immediately, and attempts to look male.

"You know I just fell from the roof," insists the Doctor. "You're very naughty, not telling people about the stairs. We've just swum through several underground water channels trying to find the control room. It took ages. Charlie even had to hold me above water so I could breathe oxygen. The TARDIS had to rescue us thrice, and I'm so lucky my companion happens to be non-existent at the present date. That could've been very embarrassing

"Now, to the task at hand!"

The Doctor aims his sonic screwdriver, still glowing white, silver and green, at the planet's solo thermostat.

"There, that should do it."

The screwdriver clicks several times in rapid succession.

"Oh, no!" cries Charlie. "Back to survival settings!"

Clarence glances up. "Nothing to worry about. The last ice age was much colder. We'll survive. We always do."

"Well, not very well against the Daleks, but that hasn't happened yet." The Doctor pauses. "Not many survive the Daleks well at all."

Several women and several men are flinging themselves against the pipework that spirals up the stairs into the thermostat room. "No valves! No valves!" they cry.

The Doctor grabs Charlie. "Here," he says. "Turn this!" He flings to him a disc. "You're the best disc player since school, aren't you, Charley? Spin this!"

Char-lie starts to spin the disc, glancing nervously at Clarence.

Clarence fishes down into the pipework and produces several charred rocks.

The church-rocks are churned in a large bag, hitting each other and producing sparks from the contact.

Char-lie hums as he spins the disc.

To the Doctor's chagrin, nothing happens. The thermostat is still falling, and the lava still fills the air with a stinging reek. Far below, the town is still on fire; what is seen is largely ash-filled clouds and smoke. The windows stop any noise from intruding from outside, a fact that makes the several men and women nervous. Their own wandering, wavering pulses make the Doctor feel uncomfortable.

Charlie bursts into tears and phlegm.

"Your sweet neighbour is safe, Char-lie," insists Clarence. "Keep spinning that disc while I set up the clock-rocks.

"One for Mmm, Two for Hmm, Three for Nnn, Four for –"

"Nynn!" cries the Doctor. "Aha, the old Vorax Enemy Chant!

"I hate to intrude on your culture, old Charley, but that won't work. And that disc –" the Doctor grabs it from between his palms "– belongs in a disc player!"

"Yeah," cries one man, "Clarence!"

"No!" cries the Doctor. "A computer!"

The Doctor rushes over to a counter, pulls a tarpaulin from off it and reveals an old NASA computer still running with a quiet purr.

Icons flash on the screen, all along the toolbar.

The Doctor grabs a headset, rams it over his hair and makes screwed-up faces until three icons stop flashing.

"Now, Charlie," he cries, "this is what the disc is for!"

He opens up the drive and inserts the disc. It starts spinning immediately. He closes the drive and makes more screwed-up faces, including the dreaded eye-roll.

(I've seen this re-enacted by my niece, with two old teddies being both Charley and Clarence. Several men and women are hand-waved in.)

The thermostat icon on screen lights up, enlarges and begins blinking.

"Aha!" cries Charlie. "So that's why they wanted us to practise with the disc." He looked crestfallen. "My poor old teacher. She tried so hard."

"She was blind," admits Clarence. "We all hated her."

"She was the worst teacher we ever had," admits one woman, still with her arm stuck fishing in the thermostat pipework.

"Hang on," said one man, "if all the heat is disappearing here, that means that it's getting hotter down in the evacuee pipes."

"Yeah," cries another man. "We're boiling them alive!"

"No," explains the Doctor. "We're turning down all the heat."

"Where does it go?" asked the man.

"Yeah, if heat moves it displaces. You cannot turn heat into cold, because cold is only a metaphor. We learnt that in school, along with dark and nescience."

"And poetry," added Clarence. "I always hated that."

Charlie shot him a look. "Before all this happened," he gestures, "I was next on stage after the Princess Moon."

"Princess Moon, Smincing Swoon," argues Clarence. "We do not need poetry! All that leads to men smincing around wearing scrolls. It'll be a much better world if all of that boiled to death under the lava."

"Along with disasters, such as our Charlie here," added the man.

Clarence stood up, his back to the clock-rocks. "We don't need disasters here," he growls. Charlie backs away, and hides behind the Doctor.

"Charley!" he cries, and rams another headset upon his frontal lobes. "Try to wink the wibbly-wobbly icon back on again. This NASA unit has been running continuously for the past generation! I'm amazed I can still download new icons for the desktop!"

"And change the desktop backdrop!" One woman claps happily. "I hated the blue. And don't bother poor Charlie. His liver-lover has perished below in the lava."

"Oh no!" Charlie buries his face in his palms. "He died! He died! Wh-where did you see him boil?"

"On this monitor. Handy this," she cries. "The teacher's dead, by the way. They just hauled her up, lying limp in the water channel. She didn't escape in time before the lava boiled the water."

"Er..." said the Doctor. "It'll be better to switch the monitors off, I think."

"Then how can we see who died and who survived?" says the woman. "Oh look, that man has been reunited with his sweet!"

"Yeah, such lovely children," a man agreed. "Such well behaved."

"Yeah," said Charlie, watching the screen through his phlegm. "Oh, oh! There's my neighbour!"

"Your sweet," confirmed Clarence through a growl.

"Yes, m-my sweet, my sweet Tree-Vour. How happy am I that she recovers enough to swing her phlegm so visibly."

"She looks like she can't breathe," added one woman. "I hope she recovers."

"The men all look weird," commented one man. "I think they all like –"

"Clarence!" cries the Doctor. "Over here! What do those rocks do when they're not sparking?"

"The church clock-rocks, Doctor? They tell the time. One hmms, Three nnns, Seven cheees, Nine breees, Twelve leees – oh, it's better to demonstrate."

With that, Clarence sat down and fishes in his bag for Nine and Twelve. They spark together in a clump, and it takes the Doctor to separate them with his sonic screwdriver.

"Fascinating, Clarence. Wibbly-wobbly vortex-strung magnetic! Very powerful! Won't tell you the time, except for cultural ceremonies of course, but very very useful for attaching to the roof!"

With that, the Doctor grabbed his wings from one woman's knickerleg and clipped them to his jacket and coat-tails. They were gold and streamlined. But now, they hummed and vibrated to the frequency of Nine and Twelve.

"Put those rocks away," cried the Doctor, and the wings went silent and began flapping.

With ease, the Doctor flew to the centre of the roof and clipped Clarence's bag to the apex. He fell over when he landed, and broke one thin gold wing. "Sorry," he apologised, easing the wings back into one woman's knickerleg. "Thank you. Now we shall see some sights!"

The Doctor hauled on a handle and revolved it until the domed roof parted in the apex and opened full like a blossom. Several small things sucked into the gap, including Clarence's bag. The roof stopped opening, and the Doctor's handle stopped suddenly, throwing the Doctor to the wall.

"Ow!" he cries, sucking his fingers. "What?" he cries to the others.

"The Human Helper App – it feels pain!" says one woman. "I said it was malfunctioning."

;

The Princess Moon stared at the half-parted domed sky. "Wh-what happened?"

One Woman God stared upwards. "Someone else is in the thermostat control room," explained the Human Helper App. "Do you require One: A Security Guard? Two: A Security Function? Three: –"

"Switch the sprinkler systems on now!" insists the Woman God.

Another Female God agrees. "And the Further Gravity. We'll need it with the apex open."


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter Three – The Female God Saves the Town Settle Point

;

Princess Moon stood with her hands clasped tightly behind her back.

"Oh no!" she cried. "There's church clock-rocks hanging from the apex, not stuck to every opening leaf."

"The doors will jam," said the Female God. "The bag's too heavy. The church must have sunk under the lava if they had to use the door-openers in the sack as well."

"My poor people," cries Princess Moon. "How many must have evacuated!"

"Let's hope they all did, child."

"Child?" bridled the Princess. "I'm not a child! I'm a teen!"

"Poor teen," she said. "One who has been in office since childhood, to have seen such a travesty."

"Poor me," she agreed. "But my poor people. I hope Clarence is in the thermostat control room."

Clarence rescued the clock-rocks with two swoops of the gilded wings. He slid them back into a woman's knickerleg.

The Doctor scratched his hair. "Damn it, Clarence! Why didn't your clock-rocks work?"

"I don't know, Doctor. They're very good at opening the church doors every day."

"Damn! But the church is under lava and – oh, sorry."

"Almost everyone got out," said Clarence, watching the monitors. Most of the town was choked with fumes and ash. Individual fires burned their way across the lava.

Three separate monitors revealed people still swimming for safety through the cool water channels. Other water channels were hissing with steam.

Another large screen showed the fire-fighters being redirected towards other piepwork valves and trying to calm the fires of rage among the rescued townsfolk.

Char-lie had stopped sobbing and was watching one monitor avidly. His palms found his mouth, and he looked giddy.

"Didn't know Tree-Vour at school," said Clarence to him.

"Ah, yes, my sweet!" said Charlie.

"Charley!" called the Doctor. "What else did you learn from your blind teacher about the disc?"

"It needs anti-virus," said Clarence, "before it runs and loads. But it never did that at school. I've always had to lug that bag around. It never uploaded itself."

_Upended, I think you mean_, said the Doctor to the TARDIS.

_No_, she replied back, _uploaded. They only have one word they learnt from humans. It means NASA_.

The Help Human App binged back.

"It's NASA!" cried the Woman God. "They say contact the Doctor first."

A God spun itself over the dome until it met the opening apex. It dropped to the ground.

"Argh!" cried the Doctor. "What's that?"

"Our God," said Clarence, falling into a religious position, as did the several men and women. Only Charlie remained, glued to a monitor.

"Charlie the Poet," said the God angrily. "Acknowledge your Gods, now."

Charlie fell to the floor and prayed.

"That's enough," said the God thankfully. "Doctor, welcome to our world. I am one of the Moons of Catswept Ness. This is the town of Settle Pont. We are grateful for your services. How can the Gods assist you?"

The sprinkler system sprang to wonderful watery life above the God's head.

"Helper Human App!" cried Clarence. "Who or what is your Doctor?"

"Bingley beep!" said the App cheerfully. "The Doctor is a biped non-human alien who likes saving disasters from worlds; who likes children; who likes young adult companions out of human; who likes fish fingers as food; who does not like sleeping; and does not enjoy sex."

"Gods of Catswept Moon," said the Doctor. "Who programmed that thing?"

"NASA," the God replied. "My other Gods await with our Princess Moon."

"The town is not saved, Doctor," said one of the several men, still bowing his arms down in front of their God.

"You may rise," said the God.

Several women and several men including Clarence stood up.

Charlie stood in front of his monitor, catching sight of his husband with Tree-Vour in tow. He sighed.

The Doctor asks, "So how do you bung up your volcano?"

The God shivered. "We don't. I haven't been alive long enough to have seen the last eruption. We keep records in poetry."

"And you were President when I first met you, Doctor," said Char-lie.

"Not now, Charley! I've got to work the computer and hopefully drag the sprinkler system over the town. Weird place this."

"Doctor!" warned a woman. "The sprinkler system's getting warmer. I'm soaked," she added.

"In a minute!" he cried. "The damn computer just froze!"

He swirled his tongue around his mouth, activating the headset's backup.

Charlie kept winking. The icon stopped flashing on and off.

Clarence ripped a headset from the wall and wore it.

"Heave over, Charley, I've got to do it."

Clarence ripped off Charlie's headset and also ripped off the Doctor's.

The computer sparked into life.

"Clarence! Why did you do that? I have to access the backup folder!"

"Why?"

"I need to hack into the sprinkler systems!"

"What does –" arm wave "– mean?" said Clarence to the God.

"It means," she said, "that the Doctor will do it for free while NASA will charge us later the longer we use the Helper App."

"And we lose our plutonium," said Clarence.

"Precisely," she said.

"Forget about the damn plutonium," said the Doctor. "Charley, get your headset back on and help me!"

Charley tried grovelling in front of the God. "Please?" he begged. "Release me from the Doctor's orders so I may rejoin my sweet and Tree-Vour."

"Let him go, Doctor," said the God. "Charley requires no further attention. Clarence will do whatever you want."

Clarence whacked the headset into his frontal lobes. The computer died, just as the Doctor had grokked into the sprinkler systems. They were already moving over the town and rained upon the fiery lava.

The town smoked and steamed. Further down the control room stairs, people began cheering.

"Thank you, Doctor," said the God, bowing for once. "You saved our town."

The Doctor stepped out of the TARDIS in Settle Pont five thousand years later, just to make sure.

In the museum stood a towering statue of the Female God, the Woman God and the Princess Moon, all clasping their hands together. There was another smaller statue of several men and several women, including Charley.

But centre stage was Clarence and the Galfreyian Helper App.

; THE END


End file.
